Presently, users of web sites, have no way of readily determining the quality of the web site, or a service provided by the web site, before viewing or using the web site or subscribing to the service. Users are often hesitant to download software products from a web site, register for services provided by a web site, or purchase products from a web site, for example, as an online purchase, without obtaining some comfort concerning the quality or trustworthiness of the web site or the services provided by the web site.
Currently, users are required to effectively manually research each potential web site or service of interest to the user. Currently available options to a user include: reading web forums; reading reviews on the Internet; reading reviews in print (for example, in magazines); or browsing the content of web sites.
When searching for a web site users are presently required to navigate to each web site of interest (which may simply be a web page) and use their own judgement, or do their own research, concerning the quality of the web site before downloading and installing software, purchasing products, registering for services or the like. If a user does not exercise sufficient caution the user runs a significant risk of falling victim to a scam, fraud, or purchasing low quality products or services.
A type of known web site rating is provided by Google's™ PageRank system (see U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999). PageRank uses links from other web pages to determine the importance (and to a lesser extent, quality) of a web page. Each link from another web page to a particular web page is counted as a ‘vote’, the more votes a web page receives, the higher likelihood of the web page being assumed to be “important”. PageRank does not gather or deal with data related to the quality of web sites or web pages, or products/services offered on those web sites. Moreover, PageRank may be manipulated by a malicious group of web pages (see Pagerank Increase Under Different Collusion Topologies, Ricardo Baeza-Yates et al. at http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2005/baezayates.pdf).
Another type of known system is “Trust rank” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrustRank) which was designed to semi-automatically separate legitimate web pages from spam. Trust rank works by starting with a small set of known and trusted web pages, which have been reviewed/evaluated by an expert in the field. This small set of known trusted pages is then crawled recursively. Other web pages to which the known trusted pages link are automatically assumed to also be good or trusted. The further away in the link chain a web page is from one or more of the known trusted web pages, the less likely the web page will be assumed to be good. Disadvantages of the Trust rank system include: (i) experts need to select then manually review/evaluate the initial set of known and trusted web pages; (ii) experts need to maintain the initial set/list of known and trusted web pages; (iii) experts need to re-review/re-evaluate the initial set of known and trusted web pages at regular intervals; and (iv) web pages which are close to the set of verified good pages may receive a high trust rank but may have never been evaluated by a human.
Another type of known system is “Site advisor” (see http://www.siteadvisor.com). Site advisor is similar to Trust rank, with differences including: (i) pages/sites are verified manually by volunteers; and (ii) linked pages are not crawled automatically. Each web page is evaluated by a reviewer. Reviewers can then manually update a database via a web interface to include their review of the web site.
This method of rating web sites has significant disadvantages. For example, potential users/purchasers of a web site, online product or service have no way of easily determining whether or not reviewer ratings are genuine. For example, a web site operator may submit a large number of high ratings, or feedback with excessive or untrue praise, for its own web site. That is, there is no presently known method for providing a weighted rating where the rating of all users may not be treated equally.
Likewise, potential users/purchasers have no way of readily determining whether reviews submitted on the Internet, including web forums, are in fact spam, paid advertisements or part of a marketing strategy, as opposed to unbiased opinions.
Additionally, reviewers of web sites are not presently able to be provided with a relatively convenient and central means for substantially instantaneously providing feedback on the quality or rating of web sites without being required to navigate away from the actual web site under review. Another disadvantage of the Site advisor system is a reviewer is required to manually log into a web interface to post a review.